Quote: (09-20-2016 02:25 PM)MMX2010 Wrote:
You can add to Ocelot's idea by referencing, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" - and then asking who was fighting over religion so fiercely that the First Amendment needed to be made.
Were Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Zoroastrians arguing over lunch on 1777? Or was it just a bunch of White Christ-worshipping branches trying to dominate each other? Once you establish that it was the latter, Muslims can't cite the First Amendment any more.
I'm actually not so sure about this one. If anything, I think the First Amendment's franchise should be explicitly extended to protect all ideologies, not just religions:
it is not the role of the federal government to legislate thoughts and beliefs. Thankfully, numerous Supreme Court rulings have affirmed the notion that laws concern practices, not beliefs.
You're right though, that the "respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" part of the amendment was written to allay the fears of minority Christian sects, not Hindus or Muslims. What's interesting is it was very specifically designed to stop the congress from establishing a state religion.
Congress, not the many states. As far as I'm aware, there was never anything stopping individual states from banning certain religions from practicing, or mandating church services until the Incorporation of the Bill of Rights from around the 1920s (that date may be a bit off, it's a while since I read into this stuff).
The main point though: there is an already-existing framework to deal with the pragmatic concern of neutralising the threat of Islam. In fact, I think most people outside of the Cathedral of academia would be able to agree very quickly on a way to treat all immigration:
1. Selectively allow entry to people who are a net benefit to your country.
2. If a certain immigrant demographic is causing problems, stop importing them until the problem can be both understood and fixed.
3. If the problem is likely to be permanent (Islam), then they can stay out permanently. The government's role is to best serve the interests of its people, which means all immigration should be assessed in terms of the benefit immigrants
bring to us, not how much better their lives will be in comparison to the third-world shit-holes they came from.
4. Enforce the damn laws that already exist. If someone is staying the country illegally, arrest and deport them. It doesn't matter if they've not committed a crime besides staying illegally and, by extension, tax evasion (the fact that this one isn't taken more seriously by the revenue-vampires on the left is telling). There are no universal ethical principles governing traffic laws either, but we still punish people for driving on the wrong side of the road, because enforcing these laws is necessary to have a functioning society.
5. Citizenship should be determined by the nationality of the parents, not where the child was born. No more anchor babies.
Boom. All immigration problems solved forever.
I've found that whenever I bring up the fact that American citizens can be nazis/communists, but people professing these ideologies are barred from immigrating into the US, the response tends to be a hysterical "are you seriously comparing muslims to nazis?!"
This is actually exactly what you want, because if you can get a tacit acceptance of the fact that
it is possible to stop muslims from coming into the US, the frame changes to "but Islam is not as bad as those other ideologies!" - you now only have to demonstrate that Islam is an ideology worth banning. This is trivially easy if you have a functional knowledge of the Qur'an and the Hadith, as Muhammed was a pretty fucking awful human being, and consequently laid down a pretty fucking awful religion.
Muhammed was objectively a paedophile and mass-murderer. He took slaves, raped, tortured and murdered his way through Arabia. Yet the Qur'an holds him up as the most virtuous human who ever lived, to be emulated by all muslims. People who try and draw relativist comparisons between Christianity and Islam don't have a fucking clue what they're talking about, and this isn't tribal affiliation speaking - I'm not religious.
Here are some videos from an excellent channel to give Islam-apologists the cognitive dissonance needed to demoralise or convert them:
Bizarre doctrines and urine obsession, followed by mass torture and murder.
Hilariously messed up sexual voyeurism cloaked as a practice to avoid adultery.
Why muslims keep exploding.
This ain't your grandpa's monotheism.
Honestly, I think the best strategy is trying to educate people about both the legality of banning muslim immigration, and Islam itself. Most people believe the MSM when they say Trump's proposal is unconstitutional, because most people (Americans included) haven't read or bothered to try and understand the Bill of Rights. Most people also simply don't know that much about Islam other than what the MSM and politicians tell them every day. Even if it will be met with hostility, it's worth putting the seeds for these discussions out there wherever you can. Demoralise your enemies, invigorate your allies.